Microsoft has announced a competition with a prize of $10,000 for the best Office or SharePoint app but don't bother trying to submit anything based on old technology - this is for the new style apps only.

The idea behind the competition is obviously to try to encourage developers to use the new development model we described last week, and to gain publicity for the new Office apps store.

The competition is to build an app for Office or SharePoint, then to successfully submit your app to the Office Store using your Seller Dashboard. This step needs to be completed by November 20th, 2012.

Once the app is approved on the Office Store, you then need to enter your app either into the Office app contest or the SharePoint app contest. While the publicity for the competition talks of ‘Office and SharePoint’ there are actually three categories (Office, SharePoint, and Best Connected) each of which will be separately assessed for the smaller prizes. The grand prize will be the app judged best overall.

The entries will be judged on the following criteria:

Intuitive and easy to use

Design: Beautiful and aesthetically pleasing

App performance: App responds well to user interaction and doesn't hamper system performance

Relevance to Platform: Makes use of the power and context of the Office and SharePoint platforms

Use of external data sources: Makes use of publicly available APIs

The competition is open to developers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia or India, and in addition to the grand prize, a further fifteen prize winners will receive Xbox and Kinect bundles. The winners will be announced on January 30th, 2013.